Is Dior's New Chinese Ad Campaign Racist?

Dior's new "Shanghai Dreamers" ad campaign is raising some eyebrows.
The images, produced by Chinese artist Quentin Shih, feature row upon
row of identical (as in digitally reproduced) Chinese men and women
dressed in 1960s and 70s Cultural Revolution garb, and a single strikingly tall Western model dressed in Dior.

Unsurprisingly,
some in the blogosphere are crying foul. The images, to them, just seem
too reminiscent of "Orientalism" and stereotypes, too flippant with a
sensitive period of China's past, and a little too close to imperialist
notions of the West bringing culture eastwards. Not everyone, though,
agrees. Are the images, in fact, racist? Here's the debate:

The Artist Speaks Shih corresponds with McClatchy's Beijing bureau chief Tom Lasseter. He first says that the images are solely his, supported by Dior, but his idea.

In
this series of work, I wanted to express a dialogue between Chinese
fashion (60s to 90s) and Western fashion (Dior Haute Couture represents
it the most). During that time, China was a country with
socialism--people wearing all the same outfits and divided into
different groups/identities like workers, students, intellectuals etc.
That's the history. ... I don't think the Chinese models are in some
way demeaning. The Dior model for me is also a 'model'--I mean she
stands there only to represent the clothes, not herself and not a
western people.

I was not lucky enough to shoot a Chinese model wearing Dior--if I did I would have put her in my work.

'No, Your Eyes Have Not Deceived You,' writes an irate Jenny Zhang
in The Guardian: "the Chinese people in the background literally all
look the same." She thinks, whatever Shih's intentions, Dior "should
know better than to commission these photographs for their Shanghai
storefront" and "should have sent Chinese models for Shih to shoot."

Sensitive Subject, Throws Designer-Artist Issues Into Relief "The visual message makes many queasy," writes Madeleine O'Dea
at Artinfo. "They suggest that the Chinese are a featureless mass,
while Dior (and the west) represent individuality." She also points out
the difficulty in parodying the 1970s in China, which to many is far
from funny. Finally, she looks at the way this incident shows the
"danger of fashion/art collaborations":

when the products of
these collaborations are questioned, it is the artists who find
themselves in the firing line, forced to defend their credibility and
knowing that at all costs they must never admit they did it for the
money.

'Clueless,' Not Racist At Shanghaiist, Shanghai resident Elaine Chow
points out that, from what she's heard from those who have lived
through the Cultural Revolution, "smiling, 'plastic' youth pretending
to be happy being exactly the same as someone else while one person
stands out could be a Shanghai dream." She also suspects the
white model was "more just the casually vapid decision made by whomever
did the shoot," and the result of the "fashion industry itself
basically lik[ing] one type of model," who tends to be "Eastern
European." Finally, she adds the perspective of a Shanghai resident:

As
an aside, frankly--given the general "harmonization" of Cultural
Revolution history and China's own fetishistic use of white models in
advertising, I doubt anyone who does go into the Dior store here in
Shanghai would have been offended anyway.

Everyone has someone on their holiday shopping list who’s impossible to buy for. For the second year in a row, we asked Atlantic readers to describe their someone, and brainstormed a few perfect gift ideas for them.